The Frelimo Party has ruled Mozambique since then, first as a one-party state. It struggled through a long civil war (1976-1992) against an anti-Communist faction known as Mozambican National Resistance or RENAMO. The insurgents received support from the then white-minority governments of Rhodesia and South Africa. Frelimo Party approved a new constitution in 1990, which established a multi-party system. Since democratic elections in 1994 and subsequent cycles, Frelimo has been elected as the majority party in the parliament of Mozambique.

After World War II, while many European nations were granting independence to their colonies, Portugal, under the Estado Novo regime, maintained that Mozambique and other Portuguese possessions were overseas territories of the metropole (mother country). Emigration to the colonies soared. Calls for Mozambican independence developed rapidly, and in 1962 several anti-colonial political groups formed FRELIMO. In September 1964, it initiated an armed campaign against Portuguese colonial rule. Portugal had ruled Mozambique for more than four hundred years; not all Mozambicans desired independence, and fewer still sought change through armed revolution.

The movement could not then be based in Mozambique as the Portuguese opposed nationalist movements and the colony was controlled by the police. (The three founding groups had also operated as exiles.) Tanzania and its president, Julius Nyerere, were sympathetic to the Mozambican nationalist groups. Convinced by recent events, such as the Mueda massacre, that peaceful agitation would not bring about independence, FRELIMO contemplated the possibility of armed struggle from the outset. It launched its first offensive in September 1964.

During the ensuing war of independence, FRELIMO received support from China, the Soviet Union, the Scandinavian countries, and some non-governmental organisations in the West. Its initial military operations were in the North of the country; by the late 1960s it had established "liberated zones" in Northern Mozambique in which it, rather than the Portuguese, constituted the civil authority. In administering these zones, FRELIMO worked to improve the lot of the peasantry in order to receive their support. It freed them from subjugation to landlords and Portuguese-appointed "chiefs", and established cooperative forms of agriculture. It also greatly increased peasant access to education and health care. Often FRELIMO soldiers were assigned to medical assistance projects.

Its members' practical experiences in the liberated zones resulted in the FRELIMO leadership increasingly moving toward a Marxist policy. FRELIMO came to regard economic exploitation by Western capital as the principal enemy of the common Mozambican people, not the Portuguese as such, and not Europeans in general. Although it was an African nationalist party, it adopted a non-racial stance. Numerous whites and mulattoes were members.

Joaquim Chissano (1972)

The early years of the party, during which its Marxist direction evolved, were times of internal turmoil. Mondlane, along with Marcelino dos Santos, Samora Machel, Joaquim Chissano and a majority of the Party's Central Committee promoted the struggle not just for independence but to create a socialist society. The Second Party Congress, held in July 1968, approved the socialist goals. Mondlane was reelected party President and Uria Simango was re-elected vice-president.

After Mondlane's assassination in February 1969, Uria Simango took over the leadership, but his presidency was disputed. In April 1969, leadership was assumed by a triumvirate, with Machel and dos Santos supplementing Simango. After several months, in November 1969, Machel and dos Santos ousted Simango. He left FRELIMO and joined the small Revolutionary Committee of Mozambique (COREMO) liberation movement.

FRELIMO established some "liberated" zones (countryside zones with native rural populations controlled by FRELIMO guerrillas) in Northern Mozambique. The movement grew in strength during the ensuing decade. As FRELIMO's political campaign gained coherence, its forces advanced militarily, controlling one-third of the area of Mozambique by 1969, mostly in the northern and central provinces. It was not able to gain control of any urban centre, including none of the small cities and towns located inside the "liberated" zones.

In 1970 the guerrilla movement suffered heavy damage due to Portugal's Gordian Knot Operation (Operação Nó Górdio), which was masterminded by Kaúlza de Arriaga. By the early 1970s, FRELIMO's 7,000-strong guerrilla force had taken control of some parts of central and northern Mozambique. It was engaging a Portuguese force of approximately 60,000 soldiers.

The April 1974 "Carnation Revolution" in Portugal overthrew the Portuguese Estado Novo regime, and the country turned against supporting the long and draining colonial war in Mozambique. Portugal and FRELIMO negotiated Mozambique's independence, which was official in June 1975.

In a suppression of the opposition, government forces quickly arrested and executed without trial Uria Simango and his wife Celina, and other prominent Frelimo dissidents, including Paulo Gumane and Adelino Gwambe, former leaders of UDENAMO.[5]

After Machel died in 1986 in a suspicious airplane crash, Joaquim Chissano took over leadership of both the party and the state. Especially after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 and related changes among Eastern Bloc European countries, Chissano began to envision a multi-party system in Mozambique.

This civil war conflict was not ended until 1992 under the Rome General Peace Accords. The long years of war had caused extensive social disruption and poverty, making it difficult for the government to achieve social goals and improve the lot of the people. In later years, as FRELIMO moved toward social democratic views, it received active support from Margaret Thatcher's government in the United Kingdom. Mozambique became a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, comprising mostly independent, former British colonies, including some in Africa.

Despite having formerly been inspired by Communist bloc countries, Chissano was not a hard-line Marxist. Following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, he came to see Marxist ideology as outdated for the contemporary world.

He supported a revised Constitution which was adopted in 1990 and introduced the multi-party system to Mozambique. It ended single-party rule. After the Mozambican Civil War (1976–1992) was ended by the Rome General Peace Accords, the Mozambican ruling regime called for democratic, multi-party elections in 1994.

FRELIMO won the first elections with a large majority of the votes. The party believed it needed to reduce all trace of socialist influence, and its members have worked to revise official histories of the Mozambican War of Independence. Already heavily mythologized, the official history of the struggle for independence has been distorted in a new way.[6]

A section of the crowd at its final campaign rally for the 2014 election.

At the elections in late 1999, President Chissano was re-elected with 52.3% of the vote, and FRELIMO secured 133 of 250 parliamentary seats. Due to accusations of election fraud and several cases of corruption, Chissano's government was widely criticized. But, under Chissano's leadership, Mozambique has continued to be regarded as a model of fast and sustainable economic growth and democratic changes. Chissano decided freely not to stand for the 2004 presidential election, although the constitution permitted him to do so.

In 2002 during its VIII Congress, the party selected Armando Guebuza as its candidate for the presidential election on December 1–2, 2004. As expected given FRELIMO's majority status, he won, gaining about 60% of the vote. At the legislativeelections of the same date, the party won 62.0% of the popular vote and 160 of 250 seats in the national assembly.

RENAMO and some other opposition parties made claims of election fraud and denounced the result. International observers (among others, members of the European Union Election Observation Mission to Mozambique and the Carter Center) supported the claims, criticizing the National Electoral Commission (CNE) for failing to conduct fair and transparent elections. They listed numerous faults by the electoral authorities that resulted in benefiting the ruling party FRELIMO. But, the EU observers concluded that the elections shortcomings probably did not affect the final result of the vote of the presidential election.

Bowen, Merle. The State Against the Peasantry: Rural Struggles in Colonial and Postcolonial Mozambique. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press Of Virginia, 2000.

Derluguian, Georgi, "The Social Origins of Good and Bad Governance: Re-interpreting the 1968 Schism in Frelimo" in Eric Morier-Genoud (ed.) Sure Road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique (Leiden: Brill, 2012).